February 2017

Win 10 Toggle Tweaker is a batch script that Windows 10 users can run on their devices to modify various settings and features of the operating system.

Since it is offered as a batch file, it is easy enough to verify the program before you run it. Simply open it in any plain text editor, or code editor to get a good look at the code.

Please note that you may need to run the batch file with elevated privileges, and that Windows will display an UAC prompt on start which you have to accept to continue.

The year 2017 is an important one for Mozilla and Firefox. Multi-process will be enabled for all users of the web browser, sandboxing is introduced, the first bits of Project Quantum are integrated into the web browser, and the add-on system will be switched exclusively to WebExtensions.

Opera Software released the first build of the Opera 44 Developer web browser featuring a refresh of the browser's user interface.

The interface refresh is part of the bigger project Reborn which Opera promises to reveal more about in the future.

In case you have been wondering what is going on with the February 2017 Patch Tuesday that did not happen. Microsoft announced on Tuesday that it would postpone the Patch Day, but did not reveal a date back then.

Stalkscan is a free online service that enables you to look up any Facebook user's public information using Facebook's own APIs.

Facebook removed, changed, and improved privacy controls several times over the last decade. Right now, information is divided into visibility groups. These groups are: only me, friends, friends of friends, and public.

Videos play automatically on Facebook by default, unless you disable the option. We published instructions back in 2014 that walked you through the steps of turning off auto-playing videos on Facebook, and in Facebook's mobile apps.

There are many popular distributions of GNU/Linux to choose from, but it’s generally recognized among the GNU/Linux world that there are a few major players that people tend to gravitate towards more often than others.

Cliqz, a German company owned by Burda Media and Mozilla, has acquired the popular anti-tracking tool Ghostery and the Ghostery brand.

We reviewed Ghostery several times here on Ghacks Technology News, the last time in September 2016 when the company behind the product released Ghostery 7 for all supported operating systems.

Local CDN is a browser extension for the Google Chrome browser that will load certain libraries from the local system instead of content distribution networks.

The extension is a fork of the Decentraleyes add-on that is only available for Firefox, and brings the add-ons functionality to Chrome and Chromium-based browsers.

The following guide walks you through the steps of checking the installed Flash version in Google Chrome, and forcing it to update if an outdated version is used by the browser.

All versions of the Google Chrome web browser ship with Adobe Flash installed natively in the browser. While Chrome does not support classic NPAPI plugins anymore, Chrome is still supporting PPAPI plugins of which Flash is one.